Golden Black Kickstarter Post Mortem

December 18, 2014

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Golden Black, Amsgames’ in-development game project, is on hiatus after it failed to achieve the funding goal expected to cover its completion in Kickstarter.

On November 10th, 2014, Amsgames published Golden Black as a project on Kickstarter in hopes to fund the project for a public day view, sadly the project reached it’s deadline on December 10th without any of the funding goals reached. Although its presence on Steam’s Greenlight was positive, with around 25% of positive votes.

Goals

Apart from the funding goal, Amsgames had a couple of other goals too:

Create exposure towards the game

Create hype towards the game

Knowhow

Analyze the market

Before Kickstarter, Golden Black was unknown; independent from its funding result, Amsgames needed to expose the game and let the market know about its existence and ambitions to improve upon feedback.

Amsgames is a startup company that needs knowledge and experience to succeed in the market. Golden Black’s launch in Kickstarter helped gain experience for further similar projects.

Cause of failure

Based on the feedback received and then analysis made, Amsgames base the Kickstarter campaing failure on two major things:

The prototype was not visually appealing: Golden Black had a playable prototype, built as a mockup to mount better graphics later; the concept art was created after the prototype to show the visualization of the final product. Potential consumers on Steam complained about that the assets were not ready or that the game was rushed. Amsgames realized that the market needed something visually appealing to judge and fund a project; the prototype’s graphics needed to be as appealing as the ones visualized in the concept art.

Low budget for PR: Due to inexperience, the budget for the marketing and PR was low. Maybe the project could have achieved more with a better budget. But that was unaffordable for Amsgames.

Resolution

Even though the Kickstarter campaign failed to reach its goals, the amount of positive votes on Steam gives Amsgames hopes for a future for the game. The game will remain on hiatus until Amsgames have enough funds to keep the development rolling, but probably in a much slower pace to the one hoped with Kickstarter’s funds.